Maybe we could mine crypto and sell it to the AI.
The AI ecosystem comprises of a relatively few foundational model companies (eg: OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google, Alibaba, Deepseek etc.) who spend large amounts of money training new models (GPT5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5, Qwen 3, Deepseek R1 etc.). These are then used by a large number of consumer companies to provide services for eg: legal, customer support, coding, etc.
Different models will have different performance on eg: solving complicated math problems or spotting errors on legal contracts with more advanced models generally increasing performance pretty substantially over prior models. The risk for foundational model companies is that if they fall behind the state of the art, it becomes very hard to continue surviving since you have less data to train/staff will leave/your revenues are lower which means you fall further and further behind. Eventually, the market will consolidate around a few incumbents that will be very hard to disrupt.
This is similar to what happened in the CPU/GPU industry in the 80s/90s. Initially, there were a large range of players (Cyrix, Via, Transmeta, Motorola, IBM, PowerVR, Matrox, 3Dfx etc.) and the pace of progress in the industry was such that 2 - 3 year old machines were basically obsolete so if you fell behind by as little as 6 - 9 months, it could be the death blow for your company. Eventually, Intel/AMD & nVidia/ATI “won” the CPU/GPU race and they held overwhelming market dominance for decades until mobile provided an opening for disruption with Apple’s A series and M series chips.
China “winning” the AI race would involve the next Intel or AMD of AI being Chinese instead of American and the entire globe being forced to buy from those companies because there was no meaningful alternative competition. There were homegrown Russian & Chinese chips attempting to compete but they were often an order of magnitude worse and only limped along on government support.
The reason Deepseek R1 wiped a trillion dollars off the US stock market in a single day was the general consensus was that of course whatever foundational model company would win would be an American company so the rest of the world still had to rely on America for AI like it had for other technologies like Social Networks or Operating Systems or Search Engines. Deepseek showed that there was a real possibility Chinese models could compete on a level playing field & subsequent moves have only strengthened this belief.
Already, we are seeing Chinese models being used more than American models, even from Silicon Valley startups, because they tend to be open source and more efficient/cost effective although still not the most high quality and the CEO of nVidia is warning that the long term trends give significant advantages to the Chinese ecosystem to improve faster than the American one (although this has to be taken with a massive grain of salt since his proposed remedy to this is re-allowing nVidia to sell their most advanced chips in China to cripple the development of Huawei chips.)